Use markers to help keep you on track while making your fence or grabing the most important resources first. Balance gaining resources in next to and away from your city. The L1 lot and the marked lot both may be worth holding for building a fort after 4000 fame. After 6000 fame you can plot a city.

Surround a City to keep it from gaining resources. I notice that if the player is inactive, odds are you can take your time to get the city. If the player is active, odds are they will relocate and you get all the reources from the empty land.

Having a higher Seige number will increase the rate at which you take a city district. The trade off is speed. Enhance Gario with low speed with the duplicates you get there is a big difference in time between a speed of 30 and 50 or 60. Now is where the Camps come into play. The Speed Camp is th one I think is most important. Also if you did not add XP to your seige up skills you can swap them out or assign them to the Gario with the highest seige. Its basicaly useless to add seige up to a Gario with low seige. Working with the cards I was delt I build this team.

Siege 101:
Even with a faster than average speed you can that delayed the troops to show a time range with relationship to speed and real distance in the game. The first Troop hit the city for 12% damage and the second Troop did only 5% made up of only Min and Cu Roi. Osiris Hit the 3rd time for another 10%. So again if you grid, fence and choke it will me very hard for any low level player to gain access to your land. This way you can build with confidence. Also know that it takes a while to take a city, Cleopatra's takeover is taking about 2 days at this low level.

Here you will see that I needed more Iron near the Grid that protects my city. Once I connect the woods to the left og that the internal grid is complete. Later I can get the resources close to the city. I can also drop the L2 quarry between the fence and the grid when replaced by the L3 quarry. I have fenced off the city to the east, who seems inactive. I am running the choke on the city to the south, also seemingly inactive. The north and west boarder the city grid blocking off at the mountians. I have the markers in place to let me know what is most important to get the next time I login. Notice the two L5 Woods and the two empty lots, you can block a quad of real estate with 1/2 the lots. Later I can grab the two food lots and two quarry's. As I get higher levels several resources are between the fence and the grid.

This shot is the same city and shows the grid inside the fence. There are 3 L3 resources, 1 L5 and only one ampty lot in the left face of the grid to be completed, both connect to the mountians. The downfall is the north east is 6 L1 lots, but these I can drop after the fence is secure. If I were to be attacked at the Fence, I could deploy the lots at the grid for additional protection.